How to EQ a Kick Drum

A kick and a bass that sit together give a song a low end that is full and powerful without turning to mud. EQ is a big part of getting there, alongside the drum itself, the tuning and the balance, and a lot of the EQ work is subtraction.

This is the order I usually work in. If you want the ranges in one place while you work, the drum EQ cheat sheet has them.

How to EQ a Kick Drum in Six Steps

1. Listen to It in the Mix First

Before you touch a band, play the kick against the bass and the rest of the kit and work out what is actually wrong with it. A kick that sounds thin alone can be exactly right in the track, and a kick that sounds enormous solo is usually the one eating your bass.

Acoustic and programmed kicks also want different things, so what follows are starting points rather than a recipe.

2. Filter the Extremes

Rumble below the kick often does nothing but eat headroom, so a high-pass is a common first move. Somewhere around 40 Hz is a reasonable place to start on an acoustic kick, though if the sub-energy down there is part of the sound, leave it. Check before you commit, though: an 808 or a deep electronic kick can have its fundamental below that, and filtering it away leaves you with a click and no weight.

A low-pass is more optional. There is often little above 10 kHz on a kick worth keeping, and rolling it off tidies the top of the mix, but listen first, because that is also where cymbal bleed and room live, and sometimes the bleed is what makes the kit sound like a kit.

A gentler slope, 12 dB per octave rather than something steeper, is usually what you want here. How audible any filter is depends on where you put it and how the source behaves, so listen rather than assume.

3. Cut the Boxiness

With the extremes dealt with, the next thing to listen for is a boxy resonance in the mids. Make a narrow band, boost it, sweep it and listen for the spot that sounds like cardboard. Between 200 Hz and 2 kHz is the usual search area, but that is where you look, not where the problem always is.

Turn the boost into a cut when you find one, and drop the sweep boost before you judge how much to take. A couple of decibels usually does it. There is no target number of cuts: if the kick does not have a problem, do not go looking for one to solve.

4. Make Room for the Bass

Kick and bass overlap heavily, commonly somewhere around 80 to 200 Hz, though a sub-heavy arrangement will have them fighting lower than that. Soloing helps you hear what each one is doing, but this decision only makes sense with both playing.

Most modern EQs will show you another track’s spectrum overlaid on the one you are editing. Put the bass on the kick’s analyzer and you can see where they sit on top of each other, which is a good place to start listening. Overlap on a display is not the same as audible masking, so confirm it with your ears.

Then decide who gets what. I usually let the kick have the bottom and bring the bass up just above it, but the opposite works too, and on plenty of records the bass owns the lowest octave while the kick lives in its attack. They can also share it, when the two have different envelopes and the timing is tight. The thing to avoid is arriving at the overlap by accident.

5. Add the Click

The click is a big part of what lets a kick survive laptop speakers and earbuds, where there is no low end to hear at all. Whether you want it is a genre question, and some mics barely capture it in the first place.

Look around 3 to 5 kHz first, and try higher if nothing there is doing it. A few dB usually gets you there, and it is easy to overshoot into something that sounds like a typewriter, so add it with the mix playing.

6. Find the Presence

A kick can have weight and attack and still feel like it is behind the mix rather than in it. Two of the easier fixes are boosting the top or cutting the low mids that are crowding it, and the second often works better because it makes room instead of adding level. Level, arrangement and the choice of drum will all move this too.

On the kick in these screenshots I took about 4 dB out around 230 Hz and did not boost anything at all. That is specific to this drum and this song, which is the point: the number is not the lesson, the direction is.

How Loud Should a Kick Drum Be?

Loud enough to anchor the song and no louder, which is a relationship rather than a number. Set it against the snare and the bass first, then check it against the whole mix.

If you want something more concrete, balance the drum kit as a group before you place the kick inside it, and leave enough headroom on the channel and the bus that nothing is close to clipping. A single dB figure on its own does not mean much without knowing what meter it came from and what the rest of your gain structure looks like.

Where Should a Kick Drum Sit in a Mix?

Usually centered, and with a clear idea of which part of the low end is its own. For a lot of acoustic kicks the body lands somewhere around 50 to 80 Hz, with the attack much higher up.

There is no law that the kick has to be below the bass. Plenty of dance and hip-hop records put the sub-bass underneath and let the kick punch above it. What matters is that you decided which one is down there.

Conclusión

Filter what the kick does not need, cut what is in the way, then decide how it and the bass are going to share the bottom. That last one is what makes or breaks a low end, and it is the step that most rewards listening to the whole mix rather than the drum on its own.